TMR 074 : Dr. Tim Ball : Peer Review - Quality Control or Gatekeeping?

Confused? Not sure what to believe about science, history, philosophy and everything else? Worry no more! Academia has a system called Peer Review in which experts check new research for "validity, significance and originality" before it appears in respectable journals, so you and I can rest assured that only the very best gets published. But is Peer Review really all it's cracked up to be?

Joining us once again is Dr. Tim Ball, retired climatologist from the University of Winnipeg, who explains the many reasons why he believes Peer Review has become at best a useless - and at worst a treacherous - system in which bias, error, dogmatism, cronyism, and even fraud frequently prevent the most important and challenging ideas from seeing the light of day. Whether one agrees, or disagrees, it's difficult not to sympathise with Dr. Ball's conclusion: Peer Review looks like something we could well do without.

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Interview Notes

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[peer review, specialisation, scientism, editor censorship, confirmation bias, crowd-sourcing, free market, open review, Climategate, Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Steve McIntyre, Andrew Montford, Warwick Hughes, Wegman Report, Richard Smith, David Berlinksi, Intelligent Design, serendipity, Galileo, Alexander von Humboldt, Frank Zappa, mosquito anatomy]